


Home Is Where Your Heart Might Be

by Nuwandalz



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-02
Updated: 2010-12-02
Packaged: 2018-04-05 10:44:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4176891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nuwandalz/pseuds/Nuwandalz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The carnival is burning and the world is ending. This is his responsibility. (an s4 AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Is Where Your Heart Might Be

**Author's Note:**

> unBeta'd.

Peter wakes up groggy, dirt sticking to his face and head throbbing sharply. His thoughts are scattered, but he’s able to piece together what had happened – Sylar. He tries to move but a gripping pressure of a hand around his upper arm stops him and he loses focus for a moment, the sights of the carnival becoming bright coloured blurs. He opens his eyes once more, this time to the face of Claire. She’s speaking but the words are fuzzy and automatically Peter reaches out and borrows her ability, the healing flooding him like ice and drowning away the fire behind his eyes. He gasps involuntary and Claire offers a watery smile back.

“Sylar,” Peter grunts, pulling himself together and sitting up. Claire sits back on her haunches and runs a hand through her hair, smearing dirt and blood.

“With Samuel,” Claire informs him, helping him stand. “I-I came to find you—“

Peter recognizes her fear almost immediately, sees her worried glance bouncing from him to their surroundings. Bodies are everywhere, some moving, some not. The ground was starting to thrum beneath their feet, dust gathering and Peter grabs his niece into a quick hug.

“You did the right thing, coming to find me. Don’t worry, I’ll fix this.”

“You always do,” she tells him sadly. They part, Claire giving him a fond once over look before running off to find survivors. Peter turns towards the destruction and follows it.

 

He finds Sylar and Samuel amongst bodies and broken pieces of the carnival and Peter sways against the feeling of chaos floating around him. He doesn’t look at the vacant or pleading eyes, tries to move quickly past the ruin created by anyone with an ability. He’s thankful that he’s not seen Lydia or any of the children yet and he hopes like hell they got out when they could. Samuel’s smile is wide and dark, eyes glittering from where he’s being held by Sylar’s telekinesis. 

“You shouldn’t have come here Peter,” Samuel says, his words curling off into rasps as Sylar tightens the hold around his throat.

“What have you done Sylar?” Peter snaps, hands clenching into fists at his sides. This is all so _wrong_.

“People with abilities amplify his power,” Sylar reminds Peter calmly, eyes never leaving Samuel’s. “So I got rid of them.”

Peter feels a sob crawl up his throat. Out of the three powers he can currently hold, there had always been one that could’ve stopped all this. He lets Rene’s blocking ability rush out of him, sees Samuel fall to the ground in a heap as Sylar’s ability vanishes. 

“You didn’t have to kill them,” Peter stresses to Sylar as he barges past the other man to get to Samuel.

“You would never have been strong enough to contain every _one_ ,” Sylar tells him, watching as Peter grabs Samuel in a hold. Samuel struggles but recognizes defeat quickly as Sylar stalks closer to them.

“I’m sorry,” Samuel whispers to Peter. 

A part of him believes Samuel, but a bigger part that reminds him of Ted, Nathan, Gabriel... his failures. They’d all been sorry too.

He feels all the abilities he’s suppressing beating at his insides, dying to be let out. The entire time, Samuel is trying to break apart the earth below their feet and Sylar is trying to electrocute them. It’s draining him to hold everyone back and later he’ll use it as an excuse. He feels a thread pull sharply in his mind before Sylar grabs his telekinesis back and shoves Peter away. There’s an empty space in his body where his emotions used to be, flung away from him the moment he watches Sylar kill Samuel with a clench of a fist. He feels the threads of Samuel’s ability slip out of his mind and disappear, cut away.

It takes a moment for him to realize that Sylar’s crouching over Samuel’s corpse and drawing a line through the skull. Between one breath and the next Peter gets up and moves, hears himself tell Claire he’ll fix everything in his mind. He thinks about forever ago when it was him and Sylar on Kirby Plaza.

This is his responsibility.

Before Sylar can get anywhere near Samuel’s brain Peter grabs Sylar’s shoulder and uses his third ability, flinging himself and Sylar into another dimension.

\--

He lands on nothing, body simply halting in a half-motion. Sylar’s screaming made his ears feel torn, the hand that he’d touched Sylar with is burned.

Sylar’s mouth is open, the tendons in his neck straining but Peter only hears silence. Blood is leaking out of Sylar’s ears, nose, mouth...

Peter collapses to his knees, mentally tries to find his heart and fails. He feels nothing, no emotions. He watches his hand heal, skin growing back pink and then healthy pale. Peter wonders if existing in this space of nowhere is a suitable sentence.

He crawls to sit beside Sylar’s broken body and waits for it to heal.

\--

It takes a long time for Sylar to heal himself completely, and when he does they start walking. Sylar never speaks, just communicates to Peter through glares and sneers and uninterested blank gazes. They don’t stop walking.

He doesn’t know how long they’ve been here, in this Nowhere that makes Peter feel unreal. Peter never had enough time to discuss with the owner of the ability what exactly the ability had the power to do. He’d assumed in taking the power he’d strand Sylar somewhere and be done with the murderer.

But now, walking with Sylar he knows he could never have done that. He doesn’t feel anything anymore, but he _knows_ leaving Sylar in this place alone is something he just can’t do. Keeping Sylar alive with him is the only way to prove he hasn’t lost his humanity. 

At some point, Sylar stops walking and Peter stares at him, uncomprehending.

Sylar’s hands are rough, yet not painful as they grip onto Peter’s shoulders. Sylar looks furious but he’s still not talking. Peter worked out a long time ago that none of their other abilities work in this place, only the healing has stayed with them both.

Sylar’s walking ahead of him now and Peter can’t remember when Sylar had moved away. He catches up to Sylar’s stride and wonders what happened to that moment of time that passed...

He wakes up without ever having gone to sleep and feels alone. Nobody is beside him, but when he turns to look back Sylar’s curled on the floor covering his face with his arms. Peter knows there is something wrong with this Nowhere but he’s not sure why.

“I don’t think we exist,” he tells Sylar. Sylar shifts and uncovers his face, looks at Peter with bloodshot eyes and hollowed cheeks.

Peter walks away from him and this time doesn’t turn back.  
He thinks he sleeps but his dreams look exactly like his waking moments. Peter walks for what feels like years until he sees something up ahead. Peter knows it’s Sylar the moment he recognizes the shape as a body.

Sylar is completely broken just like he was when they first transported here and Peter stares at the scene, the memory.

Peter reaches a hand out and touches the slick skin. At the moment of physical contact the feeling of hatred rushes through Peter like burning, setting fire to his insides and making him cry out. He feels as if he’s being electrocuted and he can’t unlock his muscles enough to move away and let go. He sees memories not his own run through him, setting his nerves on edge until his mind feels like it’s fraying and his skin feels raw.

This time when he closes his eyes he sees blackness.

\--

Peter wakes to a world that looks too bright and too dark at the same time.

“You ignorant fuck!” Sylar spits out, slamming Peter across the jaw with his fist. Sylar screams out in agony, cradling his fist and as Peter sits up, cupping his jaw he sees Sylar’s hand is shattered. Sylar is thin and pale; bones are sticking out of him in strange grotesque angles. Without a word Peter moves to Sylar’s side and helps him push the bones back into shape, feels them click into place under his fingers. Sylar wipes away the blood, showing slick freshly healed skin underneath and Peter realizes that his own body is sore and healing.

“I’m hurt,” Peter whispers. Sylar peers up at him, looking disgusted. For good measure Sylar punches Peter again and it _hurts_ so much that it makes Peter laugh. He laughs until Sylar goes to hit him again, Peter’s own arm deflecting the attack. The two wrestle, kicking and punching and drawing more blood. When they’ve both knocked out teeth and broken bones that are already healing, they part, standing on shaky legs and looking around their environment. Everything is all the wrong colours, like a negative photo. It gives Peter a headache.

“What were you feeling when you took us away?”

“Empty,” Peter answers honestly, surprising himself. 

“What are you feeling now?” Sylar asks. But his tone is mocking and nasty, his lips a smirk. Peter doesn’t answer and instead looks at the ground that seems to be weaving between different colours under his feet.

“I took your voice away,” Peter says, feeling lightheaded. “I put us somewhere empty.”

“You transported us into Nothing, Peter,” Sylar says harshly. “I can’t exist in Nothing.”

“Those memories...”

“Clairsentience, I forced you to take my ability.”

“You gave me back empathy?”

Peter stares at Sylar, reeling.

“Only what the clairsentience could fix. The damage is extensive, but I could fix it myself.”

Peter blinks.

“If I wanted to.” Sylar grins, showing teeth.

The world shifts to dull tones, looking more realistic and less like a horror show, ripples move across the surface in time with Peter’s heartbeat. Peter looks away from the morphing sky to notice Sylar staring at him. He turns away from the other, noticing with each movement the world around them is changing until a cafe can be spotted in the distance. Peter shrugs on confidence he doesn’t feel and starts walking towards the building. Sylar falls into step behind him without a word.

By the time the two reach the run down cafe, the world has become sepia and it’s clear that nobody else is around. There are layers of dust caked on everything and Peter feels grimy by simply pushing open the door to the cafe. They find food and refreshments, everything they need to survive. Lockers in the staff room contain clothes that aren’t soaked in blood, and the two go through everything, grabbing supplies. 

Peter stands at the main counter, opening jars that are filled with cookies, poking through them. Sylar is sitting at one of the booths, eating a meal he managed to scrounge up for himself. Peter feels the clairsentience begging to be used on all the objects, but he knocks it away with a thought – hides the memories Sylar gave him behind a door he never wants to open. He grabs one of the jars and brings it over to the booth where Sylar sits, putting it on the table. Peter stands there for a moment, towering over Sylar, watching as the other man stabs food on the plate with a fork in his left hand and play with a small toy car with his right.

“I don’t know where we are,” Peter says, looking around the vacant cafe once more. “It looks like we’re stuck in a photograph.”

Sylar just laughs.

They live in this new place, this, Somewhere which isn’t as confusing as being Nowhere but still disconcerting to Peter when he notices nothing changes. It reminds him of Hiro’s power, everything silent and still, kept forever in one single moment.

Days have passed, but Peter counts his _waking_ moments as days, no shift in light can offer a hint to prove time really is moving. He figures Sylar knows more about what’s going on, but for some reason he can never work up the courage to ask. Sometimes he remembers the way Nowhere made him feel and he picks a fight with Sylar just to feel again. He wonders if perhaps Sylar gave him more than just the ability for history.

Peter doesn’t like the way Sylar looks at him, eyes never straying away from him. It bothers him.

They leave the cafe out of boredom, head into a barely existing city with street names only he recognizes. This Somewhere is like a ghost town, almost resembling the future he once saw with a girl named Caitlin. A pang that he usually feels at the thought of name doesn’t come, but the thought brings forth a gloomy haze to the world, drowning the sepia into greys and blues. Some of the alleys disappear into nothing, roads become transparent and invisible, broken off, unfinished. The city looks like Isaac’s unfinished paintings – missing the important part. 

He manages to find his apartment building stuck halfway through a road and enters, Sylar curiously following. Instead of the hallway, the door simply opens to his apartment, furniture almost exactly how he remembered. He drags fingertips over the tables, chairs, shelves and spots inconsistencies. His kitchen is halved, looking squashed and the closet in his bedroom leads to another room entirely. Sylar makes a strange noise behind him before pushing past Peter to enter the new room. Peter follows, wary, and realizes that it’s not a room hidden away here but a _shop_.

There’s a window, giant letters labelling the store declaring it a place for watch repairs.

“It’s silent here,” Sylar remarks, eyes drinking in the store.

“It’s silent everywhere,” Peter points out, idly walking over to a desk covered in watch pieces.

“You can’t hear the ticking.”

Peter follows Sylar’s gaze to the assortment of clocks shelved at the far end of the store. None of them are moving, every single one stopped – frozen in time. It’s a strange sort of relief for Peter, to recognize a pause in time. Sylar on the other hand looks disgusted again.

“Time is frozen here,” Peter murmurs.

“No,” Sylar says, voice angry. “Just you.”

Peter takes his own bedroom, Sylar takes the entire store. When Peter wakes up, the world looks like morning.

\--

Sylar has never asked Peter how long they’ll stay. Peter isn’t sure if Sylar’s resigned to being Peter’s prisoner or...

Actually, Peter doesn’t understand at all why Sylar’s still with him. He could’ve stayed at the cafe.

“I can’t exist in Nothing,” Sylar tells him impatiently, hands working to repair a clock.

“I don’t understand,” Peter grouses. He’s irritable, while this area has managed beautiful mornings and dusky nights, the day usually holds rain. 

“Why don’t you leave?” Sylar asks rhetorically, eyes focussed on the pieces in front of him. “You’re safe here, you feel comfortable.”

“No, I don’t feel either of those things”

Sylar pauses, looks up at Peter with the most strangest expression. Peter thinks back to a future with a brother called Gabriel and a boy called Noah.

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t feel those things,” Sylar comments. “I haven’t given you anything to supply you with such feelings.”

Peter groans, jerks himself away from the working station and paces loudly, angry. The rain outside turns harsh, becoming a storm. Sylar is still watching him.

“Peter, you understand this place – leaving means going into the unknown, being afraid.”

“This is my _home_ ,” Peter says, disagreeing. “It’s got nothing to do with being afraid. I trapped us here, trapped _you_ here. To keep people safe.”

Sylar stands, flings a hand out and sends telekinesis crushing into Peter’s bones. Peter waits until his legs and ribcage are healed before attempting to stand, noticing Sylar has sat back down and attended to the clock once more. The anger and irritation is gone now, a calm boredom sinking into his bones instead. He hears the storm ease up, the thunder muffling and the downpour being faint light rain.

Peter returns to his bedroom, but doesn’t close the door. From his position on the bed he can just make out Sylar’s hunched back, he watches the slight movements in the other body until he sleeps.

 

“Do you ever consider what happens,” Sylar is saying, waking Peter up. “When you fall asleep?”

Peter knuckles sleep from his eyes and sits up, noticing belatedly he went to sleep with his shoes still on.

“What?”

Sylar crouches down beside the bed, eye level with Peter.

“I’m almost finished the clock.”

“Good for you,” Peter drones, rolling onto his back and staring at the ceiling. 

“It’s important,” Sylar points out. Peter lets his head roll to the side, looking at Sylar. The Sylar that’s been with him in the Nowhere and now here with him Somewhere is different to what Peter had expected. Without the bodies to remind him, Peter has trouble holding onto his fear and sense of moral duty to be Sylar’s keeper. In this dimension the time has passed (or not passed) in a way that made all his previous misgivings with Sylar pointless, baseless. They’re nobodies here. 

He shuffles out of bed and walks into the store, taking his usual lean against the workbench. Sylar pushes Peter down into the chair, looms over him and reaches out across Peter’s shoulder to the clock.

“It looks finished already.”

“Just the last piece,” Sylar tells him, using his fingers to manipulate telekinesis around the small piece. Peter watches Sylar click it into place, sees the gears whirring to life. He feels a smile stretch across his face, feeling part of the accomplishment. Peter gently grabs the clock, turns it so that he can see the time. The hands are moving and its ticking and Peter can’t help but laugh. Sylar walks around from behind Peter, comes to stand on the opposite side of the bench, facing him.

“There’s something wrong,” Sylar tells him, half amused, hiding a secret.

Peter looks back at the clock, remembers briefly what it was like having Sylar’s power and the understanding that came with it. 

“Listen to the ticking,” Sylar offers, leaning across the bench.

Peter counts the ticks in his mind, realizes the rhythm is off and uneven. 

“It’s out,” Peter says, confused. “I don’t understand – it’s broken?”

“It’s broken,” Sylar agrees. “It’s working, it’s just not keeping the right time.”

Sylar points to Peter’s forehead, makes a small circular motion.

“ _Your_ ticking,” Sylar confides. “Is off.”

“My...”

“This clock.” Sylar grabs it, gives it a small shake to catch Peter’s attention. “It’s you.” Sylar breaks it apart with his ability, the pieces floating in front of Peter’s eyes. With a few short jerky motions the clock puts itself together under Sylar’s gaze.

Peter accepts the newly re-made clock into his own hands, listens to the ticking. Unlike before, this time the ticking does match up with Peter’s one-mississippi.

\--

The clock sits on his nightstand, keeps apparently perfect time according to Sylar. Sylar doesn’t fix any of the others, but he still uses the store as his own space. Peter notices books strewn about the workbench instead of timepieces and handwritten letters floating about the room.

Peter understands on a basic level that the weather of the city is shifted by his moods, he recognizes now that the city is his memory of the city, that the cafe and the store are Sylar’s. He doesn’t understand anything more than that; Sylar explains that it’s because Peter doesn’t want to understand.

Peter sets his new life around the clock, the time gives him purpose, let’s him know that they’ve been stuck in this dimension for a very long time. Peter doesn’t want to count the days - his life is made up of the hours, minutes and seconds.

He eventually gives up on watching time pass and takes the clock to Sylar.

“You can fix me, right? Just like this clock.”

He dumps it on the open page of a book Sylar’s reading. Peter notices that the book pages are blank.

“I can fix you,” Sylar promises.

“Do it.”

Peter finds himself staring at the dusty roof of the store, knows his limbs are twitching without his consent. He knows now this is what Claire had gone through, had endured as Sylar had taken her ability. A part of him can feel Sylar, his senses and his own abilities are reaching out to the foreign presence tinkering with his brain. There’s a deeper feeling digging into him, rough touches like fingers raking through his lungs and throat, making his fingers feel numb and his eyes water. It’s highly uncomfortable, ghost touches crawling over and under Peter’s skin.

“I can’t see anything,” Peter says after a moment, his tongue feeling too large. He feels an uncomfortable pulling sensation tear through his body before his sight returns.

“Sorry,” Sylar says without meaning.

A pushing sensation this time and Peter gasps, feeling pins and needles break out across his chest. He wants to move, but he can’t. There’s a pressure building up behind his eyes and Peter desperately wants to get away.

“Sylar,” Peter warns.

The pressure turns to agony, blazing from his head down to his toes. His vision flashes to white for a moment, then refocusses on the roof above. He can’t feel his body at all. He sees Sylar move, a sharp edged shadow and then white noise is exploding in his ears.

After a moment, everything eases down and Peter’s body becomes weighted, feeling solid again. 

“There, done.”

He sees Sylar’s face come into view at the same time the healing ability seems to go into overdrive, seaming his brain and skull and skin back together. The sensation makes his heart stutter, his breath catch. He stares up at Sylar and feels the irrational urge to become hysterical. The restlessness, boredom, anger and irritation that’s lived under his skin ever since awakening in Somewhere is gone, drowned out by, sorrow, grief, hope... feelings he forgot he had. He’s so utterly grateful to Sylar he wants to cry.

“The empathy’s back,” Peter tells him softly. Sylar nods, arms folded across his chest. A flood of emotion shakes Peter so harshly he has to close his eyes against it all. When he opens them, Sylar’s gone.

\--

He wanders the city of Somewhere, watches the world morph into more colour, the rain become nothing but cool breezes and hot sunlight. He tries to find Sylar, but a part of him knew the moment he woke up that Sylar didn’t exist here anymore.

Peter reaches the edge of Somewhere, an invisible line drawing itself before him. Ahead of him is the exact same path he came, a mirrored version. He follows the perimeter but never finds the dusty road to the cafe again. The cafe, like Sylar, doesn’t exist anymore.

Eventually he makes his way back home, expecting the store to no longer exist either. He’s surprised to find it still occupying the space in his cupboard. 

Sitting in the middle of the store Peter reaches out to the books nearby, flicks through the empty pages. He uses a pencil and scratches images he can see, just like using Isaac’s power. He has no precognition, his three abilities are still Claire’s, Sylar’s and the dimension teleporting.

After he’s managed to fill in half of the books in the store with his memories, Peter takes the first book to bed, opening to the page of the carnival and the bodies. He wants to cry, sob and scream at the horror, at his guilt, at the unfairness of it all. His eyes and throat burn and his gut aches, but he can’t get himself to let it out. 

He understands now, what had happened. The moment he’d seen the hopelessness of the carnival and its remains, he’d wanted to become numb. The ability hadn’t known any better – it had taken him to a place where no feelings existed. A Nothing.

But Sylar had been with him, brought into the Nothing too. He hadn’t been able to survive. By some miracle, or luck or perhaps even Sylar’s own ability had allowed him to survive as long as he had. But Peter isn’t entirely sure if Sylar was ever with him to begin with.

Regardless, Sylar had given him back emotion – anger, hatred. They couldn’t live in a Nothing when they _had_ something. Sylar had forced him to live again. Through anger, irritation, rage, hate. But now, there’s more than that inside his heart. There’s sadness, terror and the slightest bit of hope. 

They’d died together a long time ago, a long drop on a homecoming night. He realizes now on a night where the world split in two, they’d died together again.

He’d thought the answer to protecting himself was to cut out his ability, his empathy, to remove the love and care for others that came to him so naturally. It had made sense, after being hollowed out so many times by people he’d loved, hurt by his mother, father, brother, Adam, Mohinder, Simone, Isaac, Noah, Claude, the Claire from the future, _himself_ from the future. In the end, it felt like there had been nobody who hadn’t hurt him.

Sylar had taught him something by bringing him to the Somewhere – he couldn’t live without his emotions, his empathy. The Nowhere had been his death, the Somewhere his purgatory. He had all the time in the world and a library of books filled with memories. He would make a new place, a place built from his abilities. A world made up from his heart.

When he had Nothing he was Nowhere.

When he had Something he was Somewhere.

Now he had Everything. He would build an Everywhere.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic in December 2009, possibly a little earlier than that. It was my first written Heroes fic that I had intended to expand into a ridiculous long verse. With each passing month I got more and more tired of the concept and when 'The Wall' and the finale aired, I had lost interest in even finishing it since the episode took so much of what I wanted this fic to be about and just, ruined my own vision for myself.
> 
> Of course as it stands now, it is still a big mess but I hope it fits with the general feel and theme of the fic. I do expect though for this to be a bit of a mind-screw for people since it really is unpolished but, I do hope it reads well in this state.
> 
> It's never properly explained but Peter has developed his 'synthetic' ability to be able to hold up to three abilities at a time instead of just one. Still a limitation on his powers, but gives him more room to work with. This has been a general headcanon of mine throughout my future fics but in this one I failed to give background for it so apologies. In case the fic was much too vague, essentially what I wanted to do was explore the idea of an empath losing his ability to feel, combined with an ability that could create dimensions. Peter is so jaded and broken and depressed at the destruction he walks in on at the carnival that he simply doesn't want to keep going anymore and in using the power, he transports Sylar and himself into non-existence. Or, another way of putting it, is transporting them both into Peter's current state of mind.
> 
> It's really up to the reader on interpretation from then on.
> 
> A special thanks goes to rtwofan who was the first person to look over this for me in it's original state. Thanks very so much for getting me into this fandom and for your support!


End file.
